Mapping potential landfill sites for North Sinai cities using spatial multicriteria evaluation

The exponential rise in the urban population of the developing countries during the past decades accelerated the urbanization phenomenon and the great need for solid waste management. This fact brought awareness of the necessity to develop efficient solid waste management systems in land use planning. Due to insufficient funds, poor planning and growing needs for solid waste management systems, many Egyptian cities dispose their solid wastes in open sites. In Sinai Peninsula, cities are located either on the coastal zones or in deserts. Motivated by the Government objective in developing the cities of Sinai, this paper tries to participate in finding a solution using a spatial multi-criteria decision support system for locating potential landfill sites for North Sinai cities. Criteria concerning three themes were combined to produce three scenarios. Environmental theme related to soil characteristics; permeability and groundwater as well as vulnerable land cover units, faults and streams. Economic theme includes slope, road network, and power lines. Social theme includes distance from airports, archaeology sites and land aspect. Prioritizing the weight of a specific theme or giving an equal weight to the three themes produced different scenarios. A suitability index map was produced for each case. Comparing the three suitability indexes; zones with the highest values were selected resulting in a set of candidate sites for each city in the investigated region. According to the characteristic of a location, a scenario could be preferred. More than an option resulted and are available to the decision makers according to their strategies and objectives.